November 06, 2005

Guttural politics

On Friday, in the waning days of a nasty gubernatorial race in New
Jersey, Democratic candidate Jon Corzine was confronted
by reporters about allegations of an extramarital affair
with one of his former staffers. Corzine angrily replied:

I'm not
going to comment on that kind of low, guttural politics going on in
this state.

And back in April, Rush Limbaugh issued the following bizarre on-air
quasi-apology for using the term blow
jobs during a rant about Al Gore and Bill Clinton (as
transcribed by Billboard
Radio Monitor):

I meant to say 'oral sex' throughout, but the
guttural term escaped my pouty lips in a moment of pure, unbridled
passion.

What's happened to the word guttural?
A phonetic (or folk-phonetic) term for the articulation
of consonants near the back of the vocal tract now gets applied to
everything from sexual obscenities to New Jersey politics. How did it
end up in the metaphorical gutter?

The simple explanation is that guttural
has fused in many people's minds with gutter,
particularly in the attributive sense of 'low-down, dirty, vulgar,' as
in gutter politics or gutter mouth. So this is an eggcornic confusion.
But in which direction is the eggcorn heading? Is it simply a
substitution of gutter with
the similar-sounding guttural?
Or has guttural already
changed its sense under influence from gutter, to the point that the word
might more accurately be spelled as gutteral? Note that both of the
above examples are from media transcripts of public speech; even if a
transcriber wanted to represent the word as gutteral, an officious spellchecker,
computerized or human, would quickly "correct" it to guttural. (For examples of gutteral in unedited text, see the Eggcorn
Database.)

Perhaps it doesn't matter whether we understand this phenomenon as a
replacement of gutter with guttural, or as a reanalysis of guttural as gutteral (meaning 'of or in the
gutter'). Either way, guttural
and gutter have been
phonetically and semantically conflated. A more interesting question is
how this conflation developed in the first place.

Formore than four centuries, guttural (from Latin guttur 'throat' via Medieval Latin gutturalis)
has been used to describe consonants articulated towards the back of
the oral cavity. Modern phoneticians would more precisely categorize
such consonants into velar, uvular, pharyngeal, and glottal
articulations. The term arose as a way to describe certain Hebrew
consonants, particularly those represented by the letters het (voiceless pharyngeal or velar
fricative), ayin (voiced
pharyngeal fricative or approximant), alef
(glottal stop), he
(voiceless glottal fricative), and sometimes resh
(voiced uvular fricative). (There is a great deal of variation in
the phonetic realization of these consonants, as outlined here
and here.)

Guttural
came to be used as a descriptor not just for consonants in Hebrew and
other Semitic languages like Arabic, but also for some sounds in
European languages, such as the voiceless velar
fricative /x/ in German Bach,
Dutch van Gogh, and
Scottish loch. Of course,
English has consonants with velar articulation
(the stops /k/ and /g/ and the nasal /ŋ/), not to mention a glottal
fricative (/h/), but guttural
has been inexactly associated with foreign consonants that sound
"throaty" to English speakers. With the advent of modern articulatory
phonetics, the term has largely dropped out of use among linguists (though
it still retains some currency in studies of Hebrew).

The folk-linguistic sense lives on, however, in English speakers'
impressionistic portrayals of the perceived "harshness" of languages
like German or Arabic, or even of other English dialects. In
contemporary usage it's one of those words that gets thrown around whenever a speaker finds an alien speech pattern somehow
displeasing. (Merriam-Webster aptly defines this sense as "being or marked by utterance that is strange, unpleasant, or disagreeable.") A quick Web search turns up such examples as "a
guttural English/Chinese mishmash," "a guttural Yorkshire accent," "a
guttural Southern drawl," "guttural Ebonics," and countless others.
Very often, of course, guttural
modifies nonlinguistic vocalizations (roar,
laugh, squawk, purr, growl, yell, cackle, groan, etc.). Such collocations
only
underscore the fact that speech described as guttural may be deemed not just
substandard but sublinguistic (at times even subhuman).

The value of speech patterns labeled guttural, in other words, is already quite low in the estimation of many, even without the help of the similar-sounding but etymologically unrelated gutter. Add to this the fact that gutter is often applied attributively to indicate coarse speech ("gutter language," "gutter talk," "gutter slang," etc.), and the conflation of guttural
and gutter to describe
vulgar or distasteful forms of communication seems practically inevitable. From there
it's a short step to Jon Corzine's "guttural politics."

Sometimes guttural is
parasitized not just by gutter
but by gut as well. Thus we
find many examples of guttural
(or gutteral) with a sense of
'visceral' or 'intense.' (See, for instance, the hundreds of Googlehits
for "guttural/gutteral
reaction" and "guttural/gutteral
instinct.") What is happening, then, is that as the articulatory sense of guttural becomes obscured over
time, the word gets pressed into service as a readymade adjectival form
for either gut or gutter, especially in contexts
where those words are used attributively (e.g., gut reaction, gutter
politics).

It's not always easy to pick apart the tangled semantic web of gut, gutter, and guttural. When Howard Dean emitted his famous scream in his concession speech after the 2004 Iowa caucuses, it was often described at the time as "guttural." Did that mean the scream was throaty, vulgar, or visceral? For many observers, it was all three at once. Now that's guttural politics.